The Waiting Game
by crimewaves
Summary: 'The caves were dangerous- mysterious, unexplainable entities slumbered within...' Halloween Oneshot. Anathem Mire plots his revenge...


Disclaimer- Me no own Skulduggery Pleasant. Way to ruin halloween, you insenstive...

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_The **Waiting** Game_

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Anathem Mire did not sleep. He had lay in stasis for years, drying and cracking and splitting like a doll left out in the sun too long. But he hadn't seen sunlight since weeks before his last day, and his penultimate sight had been the vision of his own blood splattered against the shadow slicked floors. That was before the house, of course.

He had constructed it in the image of his home in the surface world, but something had gone wrong... He should have expected that. He should have expected the cave monsters to get him too. The caves were dangerous- mysterious, unexplainable entities slumbered within, waiting with glassy eyes open and quiet jaws hanging wide. He was one such entity now. He had known it since he woke. Some new power humming through the mummified skin, the rotting bone, a power that tasted both sour and electric. Usually it was not painful; not unless he was adjusting his home, essentially snapping and mending his very bones into a new, painful shape. Or when he thought of the girl...

The girl! Her face drifted across his mind's eye, the curtains around him suddenly sighing and moulding themselves into the shape of a young body. They even mimicked breathing, and Mire snarled and snapped his mouth in rage. He hated _hated __**hated **_the girl! The walls knew it- they crumbled and shifted and turned into jagged teeth, devouring the floorboards and the furniture. With a visible effort, Mire calmed himself using the old method from back when he was inferior and alive: massaging the bridge of his nose with fingers. His nose cracked off, and he eyed it with distaste before holding it so it hovered before the empty chasm in the middle of face. He breathed in through the hole and the nose was sucked into his face, plugging it again. With a wiping motion a fresh coat of clean skin cloaked his corpse, bringing with it the familiar odour of the old spray he used as a fabric freshener. Another memento from the sunlight days.

Idly, he leaned down, the floor boards elongating and groaning until they formed a cup like chair for him to sit in. Upstairs was an entrance. He knew the entrance well; many times he had spent in life throwing the insolent and the disloyal through that same entrance, listening to the sounds of the hungry monsters feasting on their screaming bodies with a half full glass of wine in hand and a smile playing harshly about his mouth. Pleasant memories were attached to that entryway for Anathem Mire.

That same entrance, in fact (and this thought made his dead stomach tug **un**pleasantly) must have been the girl's way in. Valkyrie, apparently, was the owner of his house. _Her_. With a snarl he shattered the wine glass that formed in his hand against the floor, the ringing noise giving him a rush of satisfaction. Oh, how he _hated_ that girl. She could have been Queen, his **Queen**. He would have allowed her everything, all the darkness of the caves to shield her, all the shadows to dance to the songs she wove. All he wanted was that beating heart close, just a little closer...

She'd **pay**! The thought is so violent all the windows scream and smash, but he doesn't care. He would find her, he would hunt her down and she would die crying and pleading and screaming and begging, and oh, how he would laugh. Yes, he would laugh.

Dark thoughts settled then, the thirst for revenge electrifying his bones and tendons. She would pay, she would pay, but all in due time.

Anathem Mire was a patient man. He had lay dead in the caves for a hundred years, explored the caves for hundreds more before then. Every inch of them was etched in his mind, carved in his skin. He knew these caves, and he knew how to wait. Revenge would be his- all he had to do was wait.

)( )( )(

He got his chance four months later. His house had stretched thin, the ghastly walls fracturing and spreading so they looped through his underground hall like the web of some great spider. He sat in the middle of it all with his faux wine in hand, smiling smugly and never blinking.

The girl, he was sad to see, had not come, but something else had. A creature- one of the creatures of the caves. A smaller one, a juvenile or simply a runt that had against all odds survived for a while without being hunted down by the more predatory beasts. Not anymore, he had thought with no small amount of delight. He even allowed himself to clap his hands for a short time, before getting to work.

The air and rock faces of the cave were permeated with a strange magic which was found nowhere else in the world. It was why these passages had seen the reign of the Faceless Ones, the conspiracy of the Ancients. The caves magic cultivated darkness, and all the nightmares that festered within it, such as himself. Unfortunately, the caves also seemed to have given the creatures an immunity to magic and an attraction to the blood of mages. That wouldn't do- that wouldn't do at all.

This one was young: its immunity was low and vulnerable. He used that, slashing at the flesh to lower the blood levels of the creature, to make the creature more pregnable. Then he had possessed it, enveloping it with his stretching and transforming rib cage, his flesh forcing its way through every orifice, muffling its screams...

Eventually, Anathem found himself inhabiting the creature. Its mind was weak, almost dead, and all too easy to crush. He did so gladly, feeling strange that his new brain had physical impulses and signals, not merely consciousness. That's when his new colour vision caught sight of a rocky outcrop that was shaped vaguely like the girl. It wasn't her, but that didn't stop it reigniting his thirst for revenge, and from smashing the outcrop with what remained of his house. Foolish outcrop. Foolish, _hateful_ girl. He set off from there, his new form twisting and shredding and morphing into his shape of old, his first body chiselled of fresh flesh.

It felt good, to be alive again.

)( )( )(

His home was different. Gone was the decor and tasteful furniture and shadowy walls. Instead there were warm colours, gold fittings, and paintings of bright jovial scenes hung up everywhere. He hated it. Hated this so called Edgeley Estate. This house was his! It always had been, and always would. He vowed he would show the girl that, when she _finally _popped around for a visit.

He could hardly wait.

)( )( )(

It didn't take long for the time to come.

Before then he had been busy, shredding the walls and charring the paintings, reforming this house into a reflection of his domain. Turning it into the perfect setting for all the plans he had, stirring and bubbling in the pit of his mind. Gone was all the aspects that made this house belong in any way to Valkyrie Cain. It was his now; all his.

He waited in one of the guest bedrooms in the upper floors, sprawled on a chaise lounge by the window with his eyes on the path and his gloved hands stirring the glass of dark red wine that was always with him, no matter what. Occasionally he took a sip for variety, but his gaze never wavered. Days and nights passed unappreciated, and he saw nothing but the lonely garden path and the flickering images in his mind's eye. Images revolving around her screaming, her crying, her bleeding and sobbing and begging to die, to be embraced by the cold and the dark. She would rue the day she rejected Anathem Mire: he would make sure of it. His mouth curled into a smirk.

Anathem Mire was a patient man- he had been dead a hundred years, and he had devoted hundreds of years to the study of a single subject. Therefore, the weeks it was until Valkyrie came home to his death-day surprise was a simple matter of waiting to him, a short and intense game.

A game he knew he had won when he saw her one night walking down the garden path. She was dressed in black, taller than she was before, far more graceful. He watched her for a while- her lack of company, the sway of her stride, the contrast of her dark eyes and hair and pale, pale face, with such pretty features, and he thought of all he planned for her...

_**-******__Knives and nails and screams screams screams _**blood tasted so sweet**_ her bare heart beating in the cool air_** lovely green eyes going dull**_**such soft dark hair does it hurt when he pulled it like **_-

...and Anathem Mire smiled to himself for the first time in years.

It was time.

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A/N Don't you love ambigious endings? This was my first attempt at writing horror, and I was aiming to creep people out, more than anything (you know, with it being halloween and all), so tell me how effective it was? Greatly appreciated.

I can't imagine the ending was happy, so I left it for you to decide. Sweet dreams tonight (hahaha)


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